What We Do to Survive

The door opened just as my fist was about to impact against the well polished wood. “Orion! Just the man I was hoping to see,” Professor Wiliams called out, her voice muffled, “Excellent timing as always. Grab those pegs on the table and get over here!”

I hurried into the room, keeping archmages waiting tended to be a poor strategy at the best of times and I actively wanted Professor Williams to like me as much as possible, and looked around. Professor Williams was nowhere to be seen, but her voice had sounded like it was coming from behind the open door at the back of the room so that made sense.

I didn’t see anything I would quite call a peg, but there was a case of silver stakes, each as long as my arm and sharpened to a deadly point, on the table so I assumed she meant those. The stakes positively shone to my mana sense, each one filled with more mana than my entire pool could hold.

I carefully scooped up the entire stack, holding them gingerly away from my body as I stepped carefully around the table and peaked through the door. “Down and to the left, second door!” her voice called out again and I obeyed. I hurried down the short hallway, passing a half-open door behind which I could see a room filled with empty cages and a suspiciously clean floor, then pushed the second door open and stepped inside.

The professor stood just in front of me, facing what took me several long moments to recognize as my outsider. The creature looked very different from when I’d left it in her care the previous week. She had stripped it of its human garments and disguise and the entire disgusting thing was stretched out across the room’s far wall.

A dozen stakes just like the ones I was carrying held it into place, silver rods piercing through its tentacled limbs without damaging the flesh they passed through and pinning it to the wall. It writhed and strained against the bindings holding it, but some sort of invisible force was clearly holding it back. Every time it tried to change form, the stakes would flare with spectral white fire and it would screech in pain, an inhuman sound like a dozen cats getting ground into a paste between steel nails and slate slabs.

“Excellent. We’ll probably only need one or two more, but it's always better to be safe with such creatures.” Without turning around, Professor Williams snagged one of the stakes out of my arms and thrust it towards the outsider. The mana within the stake flared, causing the intricate web of runes etched into its surface to light up with a shining emerald glow.

A moment later, the rods pinning the outsider in place flared as well, and then the one she was holding hurtled forward, piercing through an especially dense cluster of whitish tentacles. The outsider screeched again and Professor Williams quickly grabbed another stake and repeated her action.

I wasn’t quite sure what exactly I was looking at, this was enchantment on a level I could not yet manage nor had the theoretical knowledge to understand, but it was absolutely fascinating to watch each stake slot into place. Despite appearing to be solid metal, they passed through the creature’s flesh like flimsy illusions, but held it in place as though it was actually pinned through with metal rods.

It reminded me a lot of the rods that Erna had used during her troll ritual, though the implementation was far more advanced than what she had used. They were clearly doing something to disrupt the Outsider’s abilities, though how that worked on powers not strictly governed by the same rules as the magic I was familiar with I couldn’t say, while also holding it in place without damaging its body.

I imagined that Erna had likely been inspired by her teacher’s own tools, or perhaps they were a more standard method of containment than I had initially assumed. Whatever the case might be, I hoped that Professor Williams didn’t mind that I was frantically memorizing as much of what I was seeing in the rod’s internal structure as I could. I definitely couldn’t recreate them fully, but I could already see several fascinating workarounds and interactions that would make my next set of collars even more effective.

It was not necessarily a better way of storing the outsider than using a simple stasis, but it certainly would make examining the creature much easier. I was once again thankful that I’d seen sense and decided to seek Professor Williams’s help with my ritual. I had no doubts I could have managed something in the time I’d had left, but it would have been a pathetic mockery of what I could have potentially done and an utter waste of priceless materials.

What she was doing now was so far beyond me it wasn’t even funny. I hadn’t had the slightest idea how I could actually examine the creature safely, nor how to keep it contained while I executed the ritual. When I’d brought the issue up the week before, she had simply told me she would take care of that part and that I should focus on the design work. I’d been slightly skeptical, but decided to trust her in the end. Clearly that trust had not been misplaced.

The ‘pegs’, as she had called them, were only a part of whatever it was she was doing. I could feel great currents of mana slowly shifting in the air around us, forming a complex pattern that was invisible to the naked eye but felt like standing under a raging waterfall whenever they passed too close to me. Once again, I couldn’t be sure of what exactly they were doing, but I was doing my best to examine and internalize every fragment of information I could glean from the process. It wasn’t every day that you got to witness such a master of magic at work after all.

Several minutes and two additional rods, each eliciting a terrible screech that ground at my ears and made my chest ache, Professor Williams finally seemed happy with her work. She clapped her hands together and the rivers of mana flowing through the room froze in place, then rushed back into her. It seemed impossible that a single human could contain such a vast amount of mana, but they all vanished one after another into her body and disappeared from my perception as whatever magic she was using to hide her power stopped my mana sense in its tracks.

“Right then, that’s all done for now. We’ll let this one calm down a little while we finalize the initial design and then I’ll help you fine tune your design. Your control is excellent for how little mana you have to work with so I think a few days of dedicated practice should be enough to learn the ritual. Then we can have you go through with it the second-to-last Thursday of the term so the whole class can watch. How does that sound?”

Except for the last part, that all sounded pretty good. I was somewhat frustrated that the rest of my class, and through them the entire school, would get to know that I’d used such a rare creature in my enhancement ritual, but there was no way to avoid that. It had been one of Professor Williams’s conditions for helping me and was a pretty well established part of the class’s curriculum.

Perhaps if she had been any less helpful, sticking only to the terms of her responsibilities as a professor and nothing more, then I would have tried to fight it. There were plenty of cases where students gained exceptions to rules like that in order to conceal personal research and secret techniques. I was pretty sure the Myrddin at least knew of me, so I might be able to win that case.

Doing so however would forever put me at odds with Professor Williams, and that was not a price I was willing to pay. Not for this at least. She was easily the most helpful professor I’d had so far at the Academy and had gone above and beyond in helping me as much as she was. That was no way to repay that sort of aid and a reputation like that would hurt my prospects for years to come.

More than that, I hoped she would continue to be equally helpful in years to come. Her speciality did not exactly line up with my own current goals, but that was no reason to ruin what was probably the most favorable relationship I seemed to have with any of my professors.

I didn’t say any of that out loud however. “That seems reasonable, Professor.” I paused, then decided to see if she would indulge a slightly off-topic question. “Will you be using the same mental enhancements as last time?”

She turned away from the outside and beamed at me, “Noticed that, did you? I was wondering if you would. Normally such magics don’t have such a noticeable effect on mages of your circle, but you’ve clearly gone much further with your own enchantments than many of your peers.”

“Oh?” I asked curiously, hoping she would continue. Much to my joy, she did.

“Well, you should know by now that it is very difficult to affect another mage with a direct spell-effect, yes? Particularly an ongoing effect. As the soul grows denser and more powerful, it becomes more and more capable of simply shrugging off mana constructs.” I nodded, this was relatively fundamental stuff we’d covered during my first year.

“Well, this continues to be an issue even as you reach the highest circles of spellcasting. Thus, mages have spent millenia developing spells that can get around this limitation, both for good and ill. Just as including sections of the Light spellform in healing spells is capable of bypassing such restrictions by including a physical component to the spell matrix, the spell I typically use with my students is actually more reasonably categorized as a temporal spell as opposed to a more traditional mental enhancement.”

I blinked rapidly, opened my mouth to ask a question, then closed it. That… was…

“Clever, no? In essence, it accelerates the rate at which your mind processes information without physically affecting the body, mind, or soul or even slowing your perception of time.”

Huh. That was not quite what I’d been expecting. “So the reason it works better on stronger mages is that they have a better basis to work off of,” I said after a moment of thought.

“Exactly! It does not allow you to make connections you would not have made without it, nor understand concepts you could not otherwise wrap your mind around. It simply has a very profound multiplicative effect with regular mental enhancements, particularly those that aid in recall and acuity. I was very impressed by your performance last week, Mr. Hunter. I do not recall any of my former students that have done nearly as well the first time I worked with them in such a way. I expect great things from you in the future.”

“Thank you, Professor.”

“Now then!” she clapped her hands together again and a dense sphere of mana flew out of her chest, over my shoulder, and then vanished into the hallway behind me. “Enough of this chit chat, we have work to do!”

I followed after her as she led me back into the main section of her office, only to freeze in place momentarily when I found it utterly transformed from when I’d passed through it less than fifteen minutes earlier.

Where everything had been neat and orderly, now stacks of books and heaps of paper littered the office. The formerly blank boards on the walls were covered with familiar-looking runes and sketches. In fact, looking around everything in the office looked achingly familiar.

I stepped over to the side, moving to stand just beside the single chair left in the room that wasn’t covered in an eclectic mess of reference materials, then looked around once again. Just as I’d expected, it was a one-to-one match with what I could recall of the room’s state when I had stumbled out at the end of our previous section.

“Whoa,” I whispered quietly.

“Neat, huh?” Professor Williams said knowingly. “I’ve always found it helps me to return to a project just as I left it. Now, where were we?”

“You were just telling me about…”